ABSTRACT
Margot Finn, whose book After Chartism is indispensable to an understanding of mid-Victorian working-class politics, has brought together and clarified recent strands of scholarship about the course of radicalism and liberalism after 1848. Class allegiances in Marxist terms, she notes, were less important in the mid-Victorian period than were national identities. Six points set out much of the radical agenda of the mid-Victorian era: annual parliaments, universal manhood suffrage, abolition of the property qualification for members of the House of Commons, the secret ballot, equal electoral districts, and payment of MPs. Radicalism had, by the 1840s, become the de facto property of the working classes, but it was not a class-specific ideology. Radicalism, and the literature which espoused it, were based on political and social exclusion. Radical newspapers, Reynolds's in particular, were directed not only at those who were excluded, but also at those members of the reading public who wanted to include them.
